jfulton.org

Archive of my old blog

This is an archive of a blog I updated infrequently between 2004 and 2009.
I update my
Twitter stream
more often so I have updated my front page to simply pull that in.

Monday May 11th 2009 12:57:41 PM

Birthday

It's around that time of year that I celebrate my birthday. I got my
Iron Key
working, hung out with my friend Craig, brought my drums home, saw Cynic with my wife and played
some guitar with my daughter.

ruQueue

I'm happy that something I designed at work is being released as
Free
Software.

Wednesday June 15th 2005 08:46:26 PM

Long Time, No Posts

It's not that I haven't been busy (and would have nothing to
post) it's that I've been so busy that I every time I think
of posting I put it off. Now summer is here and my top five posts
contain Summer Vacation from last year... not any more.

Recent news:

I taught the second half of an Intro to Programming course in
Python
at
SCILS.

Free Software Foundation Meeting

This meeting was more exciting than the 2003 and 2004 meetings
and it also left me feeling more optimistic about the
movement.
Unfortunately, I was rather tired and didn't take as good notes
as I would prefer. However, some of the people that I attended
it with have posted some information on it
(Richard
and
Beth).

All Hallow's Eve

Recording with Free Software

I'm interested in recording music again.
AGNULA,
a Debian
based distro looks promising.

I'm happy to see that there is a
recording-grade sound card that
works with the Linux kernel, the
RME
Hammerfall.
I found an
article about how to set it up.
The equipment from the article is not too cheap
(
PCI and
Multiface). I might start by seeing how far I can push
SoundBlaster Live.

Fractal Music Explanation

Rolf Wallin has an
article
that gives you an idea of how to actually start making fractal music.
I.e. this article is different since a lot of the other fractal music
pages on the net don't seem to explain how the music is
created.

Wednesday July 14th 2004 12:33:27 PM

My New Media Player

Wouldn't it be cool if my audio player had some visual representation
that was a function of the audio so that I could watch "new age dreams
of flying" as I listed to my music? That way the complexity
of all those fancy graphics could introduce bugs so that my audio
player
could work less reliably... Hmmm. Perhaps it wouldn't be that cool.

In my applying the "small is beautiful" philosophy I
am opting to use command line tools instead of GUI
ones like xmms
to play music. This approach may not be for everyone.

For example, I am now using
madplay
to play music that is encoded in the popular but
patent encumbered MP3 format:

After untaring the
modal
webserver and going into the directory of its files,
doing a csi *.scm started the chicken and (spawn-server
5000)
started the server.

I could then point a browser at http://localhost:5000/ and
see the
HTTP requests printed on the Scheme prompt.

After pasting some of the examples into the read-eval-print loop I was
able
to type (show page1) and see the output of Hello
World, however I was not able to see it run in my browser by
pointing the browser at
http://localhost:5000/page1.

I might have misunderstood something in the tutorial. No time to fix
now.
I will respond to this when I find the time to figure it out.

Also, I read an
article
about using S-expressions to make dealing with XML nicer
via ssax.